Finding My Way to Femme

I think that femme has always been inside of me, just waiting for the right time to emerge. For the longest time, femme was like a secret, locked away in a diary hidden under a mattress. I was cut off from the queer community for so long that I only recently became privy to its existence, save for historical references from a gay studies course in college.

It was my love of butch women that guided me to femme. In reading works by Sinclair Sexsmith and Ivan Coyote, I discovered Joan Nestle and Shar Rednour, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarashina and Bevin Branlandingham. I bought Visible: A Femmethology and added The Femme’s Guide to my RSS Reader. I saw myself in these women and was finally able to verbalize an identity that encompasses all of me. Femme feels like home.